Susan Shirk Comments on Seoul-Beijing Ties
Choosing US, China needs not be a zero-sum game for Seoul
01/02/2011
Sunny Lee,
The Korea Times
Meet professor Han Suk-hee of Yonsei University and professor Kim Heung-kyu of Sungshin Women's University.
Han and Kim have been among the busiest troubleshooters of the Seoul-Beijing relationship in 2010, frequently shuttling between the two capital cities to talk with Chinese academics, security experts, and government officials, about pending bilateral issues such as the sinking of the frigate Cheonan and North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, among others.
“It was a year that South Korea and China saw a large divergence of views,” summed up Han, who sits on a committee that advises President Lee Myung-bak on foreign policy.
Kim’s answer was no different. “It was a year in which mutual mistrust manifested itself,” said Kim, who until recently had had a stint with the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, the foreign ministry’s top think tank. Now, at his new post at a private institution, Kim is extending his China expertise to public diplomacy.
Given the bitter diplomatic spat the two countries had over how to deal with North Korean belligerence and all the titillating media reports on the estranged relationship between the two neighboring countries, the duo’s assessment may come as no surprise.
Yet, the two experts’ description of bilateral ties is much more nuanced than the simple black and white picture some pundits tend to paint.
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Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS.
She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.
